The ruling party needs to deliver. Its relevance is not divinely bestowed, writes Dumisani Hlophe.
THE ANC should not disintegrate and die. The current organisational rapture is a necessary evil. It’s how the ANC responds to this implosion that will determine whether it descends into oblivion or emerges stronger and rejuvenated.
The ANC needs to remain a major political force because liberation has not been attained yet. It remains a historical and struggle embodiment for liberation and freedom. Its historical mission remains intimately woven with the aspirations of a better life for the apartheid-colonised black majority.
The ANC character and content is that of a national movement. Thus, in its ideal functionality, it bears the historical mandate to liberate and enhance the quality of life of the black disenfranchised majority.
This is the character, content and identity the ANC has been losing over the past few years. The negative outcomes of the recent local government elections merely provided an event to crystallise the decline that has been in progress.
Essentially, the ANC’s electoral loss signified loss of historical character; abdication of liberation mandate; abdication of leadership of society; and a reorientation of leadership from one that is mass-serving to one that is self-serving. Therefore, a decline and disintegration of the ANC has the potential adverse effect on the following: a decline of liberation consciousness and discourse.
This will create an impression that South Africa has normalised socially, economically and politically when the opposite is true.This attitude is already becoming prevalent in South Africa.
Rather than a liberation agency, the ANC government has been reduced to facilitating the dominance of market forces. Rather than driving a liberation agenda with an unapologetic bias towards redistribution, the ANC has adopted trickle-down policies. In the main, this focuses on creating conditions for markets to thrive with the false hope that such market benefits will trickle down to the masses.
Rather than position the masses at the centre of its rule, the market forces have assumed a centre stage, while the black majority remains on the periphery, as was the case during apartheid. Ironically, this neo-apartheid socio-economic pattern is now driven by a liberation movement.
Essentially, the presence of the ANC in national politics provides black South Africans with the yardstick of how far or closer the deprived masses have veered off the liberation course. It enables the black majority to assess progress, regress or stagnation in liberation indicators: land restoration, employment, equality, free and decolonised education, among others.
The #FeesMustFall movement provides a clear example in this regard - holding a liberation government to its liberation mandate. At the core of the #FeesMustFall movement are generations of black students inheriting indebtedness and being condemned to perpetual poverty.
None of the current political parties carry as much liberation capital as the ANC. Even the EFF that has assumed the liberation discourse abandoned by the former traditional leftist forces such as the SACP and Cosatu does not come close. More than any other force, the ANC remains the yardstick of liberation in South Africa. It remains the point of reference of black emancipation.
The presence of the ANC in national politics also provides an appropriate point of reflection on the pitfalls of the liberation agenda post-1994. One key point that emerges is that liberation is impossible through liberal principles, institutions and processes. With hindsight, some, if not many, are now aware that issues such as transformation, black economic empowerment, and willing seller/willing buyer arrangement on land are mainly liberal tools to capture select blacks and make them elite. In turn, the new black elite serves as a buffer between the masses and the real white economic elite.
The ANC’s utility as a point of liberation reference cannot be limited to the negatives and shortfalls. If it is to be worthy of the liberation yardstick, it must duly live up to such a historical mandate. Four things are crucial in this regard: leadership; ideology and theoretical capacity; state performance; and mass mobilisation.
The biggest challenge of the modern-day ANC is leadership. This leadership carries the character of being self-serving rather than serving the black majority in particular. It is a leadership that seems trapped in capitalist consumptions rather than progressively moving with its colonised black people.
Hence, state capture and patronage are the dominant themes when engaging on leadership matters.This is a leadership apparently divorced of accountability. Central to this is a weak leadership at Luthuli House incapable of holding its own executive deployees to account, to ethical conduct, and integrity.
One corrective measure in this regard is not so much the recalling of the executive deployees but the resignation of both the deployees and the leadership at Luthuli House, simply because they reinforced one another when the situation demanded that they hold each other accountable to ANC norms. A leadership recall would be disastrous to the ANC. But leadership resignations would be more productive, as it is usually motivated by the interest of the organisation.
Ideologically, the ruling party cannot be the traditional “broad church”.
The broad church stance was useful in galvanising all sectors and persuasions of society in fighting against apartheid. As a liberation government, the ANC needs to make an ideological stance in favour of the downtrodden black masses. It cannot speak left, but act right, and expect the masses to endorse it perpetually. However, for the ANC to take an ideological stance and articulate itself properly, it needs to capacitate itself theoretically.
This has been a major shortfall since 1994, the inability to construct and articulate itself in liberation theories.
Many in the ANC have accepted the post-1994 liberal jargon as the natural course of society.
The third element to make the ANC relevant is state performance. As the ruling party, it has to lead and manage a productive government. It needs to drive a state known for its liberation and change agenda.
There’s a problem when state leaders are in courts facing allegations of unconstitutional conduct and then lose such cases!
The fourth would be mass mobilisation. Intrinsically, a performing state is closer to its constituency than a non-performing ruling party. In this case, a highly performing ANC government would be much closer to black people than the local government elections results indicated.
In the final analysis, while the ANC is a national necessity, its relevance is not necessarily divinely bestowed. Its historical importance is to the extent that it practically projects itself as a force of change.
This will manifest itself in the utility of its leadership, its intellectual ability to lead society, managing a government that delivers, and building strong partnerships with communities it serves.
The ANC has an umbilical cord with the apartheid colonised. Perhaps history is not ready to cut that cord. Doing so would mark the ANC’s historical abdication of its duties.
The current organisational rapture could be the ANC’s post-1994 labour pains. But then it could also mark the beginning of the ANC as a “once upon a time” movement!
* Hlophe is governance specialist at the Unisa School of Governance. He writes in his personal capacity.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent